Reminescences

Descartes vs. Fermat, Fermat vs. Descartes

Franka Miriam Brückler orcid.org/0000-0002-8410-0476 ; Matematički odsjek, Prirodoslovno-matematički fakultet *

* Corresponding author.

Abstract

Among the greatest mathematicians of the first half of the 17th century are certainly the Frenchmen Réné Descartes and Pierre de Fermat. Even though they were contemporaries, coming from good families, and lawyers by education, their life paths were significantly different. While Descartes devoted himself entirely to philosophy and mathematics, Fermat remained only a hobby-mathematician, and a lawyer by profession for all of his life. Independently of each other, they developed some equivalent mathematical ideas, specifically the idea of a coordinate system and methods of determining tangents to curves.
Their conflict over the correctness of the methods of determining tangents is one of the most prominent controversies in the history of mathematics. In this article, we present many details of that conflict, as well as the contents of the mentioned methods and the biographies of these two great mathematicians.

Keywords

Réné Descartes, Pierre de Fermat, Marin Mersenne, analytic geometry, tangent to a curve, differential calculus

Hrčak ID:

319297

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/319297

Publication date:

21.12.2023.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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